TRIENNIAL
As if fortune had had no other object in view but the trial of Nancy’s
character by adversity, she had no sooner handed over Letizia to the
care of the Sisters than she secured an engagement with a bloodthirsty
melodrama called _The Lights of Paris_, in which she toured what were
called the “number two” towns for many, many weeks. Her part was very
different from the one Mr. Plimmer had offered her. Instead of the
unhappy young mother reconciled in the last act to a forgiving husband
she was to be a dark-eyed adventuress, all ostrich plumes and swishing
silk petticoats, whose diabolical support of the villain earned groans
and hisses from every audience and whose death at last in the very
sewer where she had plotted to drown the heroine was greeted with
acclamation. However, what did the part matter? She was earning four
pounds a week, out of which she was managing to save half. And what
did these dreary manufacturing towns matter? There was less temptation
to spend money in them. Or the dull company of second-rate actors and
actresses? There was small encouragement to waste her money in buying
clothes to impress them. Blackburn, Bury, Bolton, St. Helens, Oldham,
Rochdale, Preston, Wigan, Warrington, Widnes, Halifax, Huddersfield,
Hartlepool, Gateshead, Sunderland, South Shields. Rain and smoke and
blight and the stench of chemicals. The clatter of clogs every morning
and every afternoon when the women were going to and from their work in
the factories. Soot and puddles. Murky canals slimed always with a foul
iridescence. Sodden shawls and wet slates. Infinite ugliness, dawns
and days and dusks cinereous, eternal in festivity, and ceaseless
monotone. No vivid colour anywhere except occasionally in the gutters
a piece of orange-peel and on the sweating walls the posters of the
tawdry melodrama in which she was playing. It was good to think of
Letizia far from these drizzling and fumid airs.
In November the _Lights of Paris_ company visited Brigham where
for several years now a theatre had stood actually on the site of
the original tabernacle of the Peculiar Children of God. On making
inquiries about the present state of Lebanon House, Nancy heard that
old Mrs. Fuller had died about five months earlier. When Letizia went
to school at the convent, Nancy had written and told the old lady; but
she had never received an answer to her letter. She did not feel at all
inclined to visit Caleb or the aunts, and although she found out where
Emily Young was living she did not succeed in meeting her, Miss Young
being away that week. Nancy was wondering if her news about Letizia had
pleased the old lady, when the following week at Birkenhead she had a
letter from Miss Young.
22 Rosebank Terrace,
Brigham.
November 20th, ’95.
Dear Mrs. Fuller,
I was so disappointed to miss you during your stay in this dreary
place, but I was away on a visit to some cousins in Macclesfield.
I wrote to you when Mrs. Fuller died, but I was afraid as I never
heard from you that the letter failed to reach you. I sent it to
the address from which you wrote last April about your little girl.
Mrs. Fuller had just had a second stroke, and I’m not sure that she
understood what I was reading to her. Still, I fancied that I noticed
an expression in her eyes that looked as if she had understood and
was glad. She was really unconscious though until she died in May
just before Mr. Caleb Fuller was married. I miss her dreadfully, and
Brigham seems duller every day. You are lucky to be on the stage and
able to travel about from one place to another. Life here is simply
beastly. I’m trying to get a place as secretary to somebody and
have been working hard at typewriting and shorthand. I hope I shall
succeed. I hate Brigham more every moment of the day. I do hope that
we shall meet somewhere again. Wishing you all good luck.
With kind regards. I am,
Yours sincerely,
Emily Young.
Nancy smiled when she read of the envy her career inspired, smiled when
she thought of Blackburn, Bury, Bolton, St. Helens, Oldham, Rochdale,
Preston, Wigan, Warrington, Widnes, Halifax, Huddersfield, Hartlepool,
Gateshead, Sunderland, and South Shields.
The following Sunday the _Lights of Paris_ company found themselves
in Warrington, and after Benediction at a little tin mission-church
Nancy saw the priest and arranged for Masses to be said for Letizia’s
great-grandmother. It was not so much the spiritual satisfaction she
derived from the fulfilment of this pious duty as the feeling that
somehow or other Masses said in this tin church for the repose of that
strange old woman’s soul would express her personality in the immense
void of eternity as effectively as on earth she had expressed herself
with those vermilion cushions and Venetian mirrors. She had defied in
her own creative world the overwhelming nonentity of Lebanon House,
just as on the walls of her room Giorgione’s “Pastorale” had defied the
meanness of contemporary existence, prevailing with colour against time
itself. Now let beauty and compassion rise from the smoke of Warrington
to sustain her soul.
There was no opportunity that December to go South and spend Christmas
with Letizia; but Nancy was gratefully surprised by an invitation from
Mother Mary Ethelreda to visit the convent at Beaumanoir on the moors
of northern Lancashire, whence she could easily return in time for the
matinée at Burnley on Boxing Day. The drive through the cold upland
air, the quiet and seemliness of the conventual life, the dignity of
the aged Mother Superior, the whiteness and candlelight within, the
snow and starshine without, all united to compose Nancy’s mind so that
when she returned to the theatre she moved in a dream, like one who has
voyaged from afar and whose body has arrived while the spirit still
lingers on the way. Looking out of her window that night, she fancied
that the stars high above the smoke of Burnley were jingling like
silver bells, so much nearer seemed they since her visit to the Convent
of the Holy Infancy at Beaumanoir on the wintry moors. And she knelt
down to thank Almighty God that Letizia’s youth was clear and bright,
remote and crystalline as one of those stars ringing down notes of
harmonious light upon the discordant gloom in which her mother wandered.
It was June before Nancy saw Letizia. They spent a month together in
the cottage where she was born among the Kentish cherry orchards. The
pinks smelt just as sweet along the garden paths as then. There were
not fewer roses nor less honeysuckle in the high hedges of the lanes.
The haycocks threw shadows quite as far across the shaven leas, across
the green-glowing gold-bloomed leas. And when Letizia was tucked
away in her old cot and Nancy sat by the lattice, poring upon the
perfumes of the evening, there were just as many ghost moths dancing
upon the dusky air of the garden, fluttering with the old fantasmal
passion above the spiced and sombrous flowers. But in no lane and in
no lea, behind no hedge, across no brook, at the end of no garden path
was Bram, who in this same month six years ago was everywhere. Yet,
in spite of the poignancy of remembered joys that she could never
know again, Nancy was very happy during her holiday. Letizia was as
diverting as ever, with her long tales of school, as definite in her
likes and dislikes and as quick to express them.
At the end of the month the long-promised stay with Mrs. Pottage at
Margate was accomplished, and Nancy noted with a little pang for the
way Letizia was getting older that she no longer called her old friend
Mrs. Porridge, just as now she always said “mother” instead of “muvver.”
“Well, they haven’t starved her at this convent,” the old landlady
declared after she had embraced Letizia and presented her cousin, Mrs.
Williams, the pleasant and hospitable woman in whose house they were to
stay. “I was very doubtful about the idea when you settled to put her
in this convent, because I’ve always had a horror of nuns, and which is
why I’ve never been to see her. I know I read a story once about a pore
girl they bricked up, and it gave me the horrors to that extent it was
weeks before I could go down into the cellar and fetch up a scuttle of
coal. But the child’s looking a regular nosegay. What do they give you
to eat, duckie?”
“Oh, we have breakfast and dinner and tea and supper, and a glass of
milk at eleven,” Letizia said.
“You do?” Mrs. Pottage exclaimed. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, they regular
gormingdise you! I’ve got it all wrong about nuns. I suppose it’s the
name that sounds so empty. But certainly I fancied if you had two
slices of dry bread and a glass of water you thought you’d done well
for one day.”
“Mrs. Pottage, when shall we go paddling?” Letizia asked persuasively.
“Paddling?” said Mrs. Pottage. “You surely don’t expect me to go
paddling?”
“Well, of course you must paddle,” Letizia exclaimed. “Don’t you know
we’re at the seaside?”
“But if I take off my shoes and stockings and pull up my skirts they’ll
think the British Museum’s broken loose,” said Mrs. Pottage. “You
haven’t seen my legs, duckie. Talk about marble columns. Well, my
legs would make a marble column look like a knitting-needle. Besides,
supposing I got my toe bit off by a kipper?”
The next morning, armed with several baskets of strawberries and a
large green-lined gingham umbrella, Mrs. Pottage set out with Nancy
and Letizia to savour the delights of Margate beach.
“Fine weather for a sail, mum,” said one of the longshoremen.
“Yes, but you’d be the one that was sold,” Mrs. Pottage retorted.
“Nice day for a row, mum,” suggested another longshoreman. “A shilling
the first hour, and sixpence every hour afterwards.”
“Who do you think I am?” Mrs. Pottage demanded. “Grace Darling? No,
thanks, young man, I’d sooner spend the money on winkles.”
It was such a jolly week at Margate. Although Mrs. Pottage was never
lured into a boat, she was persuaded by Letizia into paddling; and
when she found herself with the water round her knees she was so much
amused by the ridiculous sight she must be making of herself that she
became as helpless with laughter as her friend Mrs. Bugbird did and
sat down with such a tremendous splash that every child on the beach
came running in her direction at the rumour that an elderly woman had
been seized by a ferocious shark. Letizia was so much amused by the
spectacle of Mrs. Pottage sitting down in the sea and remaining there
helpless with laughter that she sat down herself, whereupon several
other little girls and boys followed her example, to the consternation
of their nurses who had to fling down their novelettes and hurry to
the rescue. Yes, it was a jolly week at Margate, a week of sitting on
the sun-baked sands and eating strawberries, of paddling and visiting
the camera obscura, of listening to Negroes and Pierrots, of digging
castles and buying shrimps for tea, of exploring the mysterious marine
underworld of the pier, of wild rides on donkeys and sedate drives in
goat-carriages, of sweets and paper-bags and asphalt promenades. But
it came to an end very quickly. Mrs. Pottage went back to Greenwich.
Letizia went back to the convent. Nancy went on tour again to play the
adventuress in another melodrama.
And for another two years she played adventuresses, rustling her silk
petticoats, hissing defiance through her clenched teeth, and smoking
with amazing effrontery the cigarettes that in those days indicated
on the stage a woman dead to shame. Nor did she catch more than an
occasional glimpse of Letizia during that time, because she managed to
fill up the summers of both 1897 and 1898 by acting in stock seasons
at northern theatres, where for one week during the illness of the
leading lady she had an opportunity of showing what she could do with
parts like Rosalind, Viola, and Lady Teazle. But the next week she was
playing the colourless Celia, the tiresome Olivia, and the prototype
of the modern adventuress, Lady Sneerwell. Yet even these parts only
lasted for the two reputed fine months of the year. By the middle of
July she was once more immersed in monotonous villainy, measuring
her success not by the applause but by the groans and hisses of the
unsophisticated audiences for whose entertainment she kept the hero and
the heroine apart until the very end of the fifth act. Her salary was
still four pounds a week; but every week she was still able to save
half. There was over £200 for Letizia in the bank when in the autumn of
1898 Nancy secured an engagement in the provincial tour of a popular
musical comedy to sing a contralto part with a good song in each of the
two acts and, what interested her much more, a salary of five pounds a
week. It was while she was with this company that she met John Kenrick.